Board of Education Vice Chairman Brian DeLima says that while it’s great that the DOE got an agreement with teachers in Hawaii’s education reform zones for longer school days, it won’t help kids who are already absent from school 15+ days per year.

Keaau Elementary is one of those schools with a high absentee rate among students, he says, and it also happens to be in one of the state’s Zones of School Innovation, where teachers just ratified an agreement for an extra hour of school four days a week.

“Unless we deal with the absenteeism problem, students are going to continue not achieving, because they’re not at school,” DeLima says. “We’ve gotta tackle this problem.”